The present invention relates to unique media identification. More particularly, the present invention relates to providing unique media identification for data storage media.
Unique identification of data storage media is useful for a variety of purposes. Unique identification facilitates tracking of manufacturing defect of a particular data storage media or manufacturing conditions common to a group of particular data storage media. Unique identification is also helpful to control which and how often a particular data storage medium is written to, for example, to ensure even wear and tear among a plurality of data storage media. Unique identification further facilitates the growing market for data encryption and data security, whether implemented as an additional feature and/or to comply with governmental regulations.
When manufacturers of data storage media provide a unique identifier, it is preferable not to incur added manufacturing cost overhead, increase cost of data storage media and/or its associated data read/write devices, or use memory space that could be used for data storage to provide the unique identifier. For example, with magnetic tape media, a cartridge shell encasing the magnetic tape medium may include a persistent memory component on the external side of the cartridge shell in order to provide unique cartridge identification. However, this persistent memory component comes at added cost to the cartridge (from additional components), added cost to the tape drives (from additional detectors to sense and read the persistent memory component), and added manufacturing cost overhead (from dedicated equipment that may be required to write the unique cartridge identification and decrease in throughput from having to servo format the tape and write the unique cartridge identification to the persistent memory component). As another example, a cartridge identifier may be provided internal to the cartridge shell by assigning a random number for each cartridge. The shortcoming of this approach is that there is a chance of two or more cartridges having the same identifier.
Thus, it would be beneficial to provide a unique identifier to each data storage media. It would be beneficial to have a unique identification scheme that could be implemented by various manufacturers. It would be beneficial for a unique identifier to be provided without incurring additional manufacturing cost overhead, at increased cost to the data storage media, at increased cost to the read/write drive, or sacrificing data capacity of the data storage media. It would be beneficial for a unique identifier to be readily accessible by the read/write drive while minimizing potential for tampering or alteration. It would be beneficial for a unique identification scheme to provide future flexibility for encoding additional information or modifications to accommodate changes in data storage formats.